A FAMOUS OLD SHIP

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 17, 21 January 1938, Page 16

A FAMOUS OLD SHIP

LIFE OF DISCOVERY I

SAILED BY SCOTT

The strongest wooden ship ever built —a ship whose strained timbers bear the marks of a quarter of a century o£ Polar exploration, has been for everyone to see alongside the Thames Embankment, opposite Temple Underground Station (wrote Dr. L. D. A. Hussey in the "Daily Mail" recently).

Discovery I, in which Captain Scott made his epic voyage to the Antarctic, is now a training ship for Sea Scouts.

To them she symbolises the greatest traditions of British seamanship. They exercise and study navigation on the decks once walked by Captain Scott, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Sir Douglas Mawson.

It is twenty-three years now since I first sailed with Shackleton and fifteen years since I returned from the expedition which ended in our leader's death. But I never see the Thames without feeling that I must sail away again.

I still treasure the banjo I took with me on the 1914 voyage. It/ bears on its vellum the signature of every member of that expedition. THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS AGO. The Discovery, was laid down in March, 1900. The total of her hull is 26in of solid wood. Her bow, designed to crush the ice by sheer weight and strength, was reinforced to a thickness of BJft.

Sir Ernest Shackleton was with Scott's first expedition, but he had to leave on account of ill health in 1903.

■ The objects at that expedition were: ' "(a) To determine, as far as possible, the nature, condition, and extent of that portion of the South Polar lands which is included in the scope of your expedition; and

. " (b) To make a magnetic survey in the Southern Regions to the south of the 40th parallel, and to carry . on meteorological, oceanographical, geological, biological, and physical investigations and researches." '~

Her company had to put up with months of darkness; with being frozen in for two winters in McMurdo Sound; and they had to fight snow-blindness, scurvy, and frostbite. i

Scott saw.to everything, and the explorers worked happily together. They might have remained frozen there for ever if a vagary of the weather had not . released the ship when the decision had been taken to abandon her1.

Saws had been used to attack the ice, parties from relief ships had tried | to / blast away the . 13ft ice barrier with explosives. All these efforts were futile. Hope faded. Then, on February 14, 1904, a swell arose and "rent that great ice sheet, as though it had been naught but the thinnest j paper." DRIVEN ASHORE. The Discovery slipped her way free through , the broken ice, only to be seized and buffeted by a violent storm which drove her ashore and smashed her stern up and down on the rocks., She survived that with only the loss of a false keel and the twisting of her rudder.

The scientific results of the expedition were vastly important.

The position of the South Magnetic Pole was fixed; 150 miles of the coast of King Edward VII Land was charted; mountains were discovered; and the scientific observations made methodically for two years were of the utmost value, to international science. :'

In 1905 the Royal Geographical Society sold the ship'to the Hudson's Bay Company, and until 1911 she was in the fur trade. ' '\

During the war she was chartered by the French Government and used for the transport of)war materials. She escaped attack, possibly because the enemy feared she might be a "Q" ship —armed in disguise.

The Discovery was called back to Antarctic duty in 1916 to hasten to the rescue of Sir Ernest Shackleton's expedition after his ship the Endurance had been crushed by the ice and sunk. The party was rescued, however, before the Discovery arrived. A RESEARCH SHIP. After the war • she was completelyreconditioned, and spent two years in whaling research, and in 1929 and 1930 she made her last, Antarctic voyages under the command of Sir Douglas Mawson.

Back in London in 1931 she found herself laid up. She^ had1 been super* seded by Discovery 11, a steel ship.

Last year the suggestion was made by Sir John Middleton, a member of the Discovery Committee of, the Colonial Office, that the Scouts should take her over as a training ship. " .

, The consent of the Government of the Falkland Islands (to whom the ship belonged), money for her upkeep, and suitable moorings from the Port of London Authority were all obtained, and she was accepted by the Duke of Kent, Commodore of Sea Scouts, from Sir Herbert Henniker-Heaton, Governor of the Falkland Islands.

Since then many thousands of the public have visited her, and Sea Scouts have their ideal training quarters in what will always be a. memorial to Captain Scott and his comrades, and an inspiration to the youth of England. -